Ideas and Intellect

 The one question that made me a little confused was question 18, which asked about what Art got out of the publishing of Maus, which is really weird because it doesn’t seem like it is a very hard question, and, more importantly, one that matters. However I found that the question runs deeper than what is the surface answer, and is worth having a discussion about for the follow-up questions afterwards. The question verbatim was, “What did Art Spiegelman get out of publishing Maus?” The answer to this question is indeed obvious. Spiegelman gained popularity in the form of a cult following, fame, money, and a popular book that will make his name remembered in history and be taught in classrooms. What he gained from this book is great, but we also have to talk about what he lost, which gets much more interesting. This is because he even alludes to it in his own book. In a section that is meant to be a flash-forward in the novel, Artie, Art’s animal counterpart in the story, is portray...

After making my rhetorical analysis prompt for Maus Volume II, I began to think more on the things that I prompted the essay writers to write about. Page 69 of Maus Volume II had a motif of smoke, and how it related to the ovens in Auschwitz, being a kind of poison for Vladek that reminds him of the past. This is shown by showing the smoke from Artie’s cigarette right above the Auschwitz chimney as to indicate that it is coming from the chimney in which the Germans burned Jews alive. Other visual cues are there as well, but it is safe to say that Spiegelman wanted us to view smoke in a negative way in this page. Now, as I am looking back on it, smoke seems like a negative thing in most contexts, but there are some times when it seems like smoke is held in a positive light, despite what the common feeling is towards it. So I wanted to ask, “In literature, when is smoke a good thing, and when is it a bad thing?” Maus has several examples of painting smoke in a negative light, like the ...

After reading the first volume of Maus by Art Spiegelman, I wanted to ask this question because it was something that was untouched even in our discussions in class. In the graphic novel, which is a retelling of the World War II era from a Jew’s perspective with animals instead of people, Vladek, the Jew living through this time period, does many things that makes you question if he is a good person or not. Of course, he does seem like a good person from his perspective, from which this story is told from. But anyone can make it seem like that. Vladek lies a lot to preserve his wife’s life and his own, and ends up leaving family members behind to eventually be sent to Auschwitz, even if that means that they will die a painful death. He wants to protect the lives of the two people most important to him, but does that mean it’s morally okay to do so? Auschwitz was a place portrayed in the story as Hell, and for good reason. For a Jew, a concentration camp meant “eternal suffering” via ga...

After reading Scott McCloud’s comic “Show and Tell,” I was inclined to explore the argument that he presented through my own perspective and maybe share these thoughts with you guys. This comic was about how comics should not be considered inferior to literature with only words, or art with only pictures. My main question for this week is “Does pairing pictures with word elevate a piece beyond plain words?”  Many people consider comic books to be childish and lesser forms of literature than lengthy novels and classics, which is the point that McCloud is trying to argue against. There is a pretty good case for why comics can take an author’s story to the next level. The most obvious reasoning to explain why this is true is that pictures can be used in tandem with words to visually show what the author is trying to convey. Words alone can be confusing to some readers when they have meaning to them not explicitly stated, or if they are trying to explain something that can’t be ea...

The discussions in class about one particular story had me thinking about another question that has always been hanging on my mind but it was too insignificant in my life up to this point to seriously explore the topic that is being questioned. How do people live up to the ideal that their culture or location forces onto them? Personally, idealism for me has been natural; I am forced to participate in certain things and perform well in school in order to be an ideal child for my parents, and I live up to the ideal of a good student by doing the same, as well as trying my best not to break any rules. However, reading how Chinese Americans are unable to achieve their ideal while it is certainly possible for me to achieve mine made me question why people want to follow tradition and be the ideal whose concept was created hundreds of years ago. The excerpt from Woman Warrior called “White Tigers” was very innovative, and, more importantly, symbolic with a lot of rhetorical meaning. This s...